Demonizing Obama

Why Christian conservatives are worried sick about Barack Obama

Untitled Document
We’re in the middle of the most Bible-toting,
Scripture-quoting presidential campaign in recent memory. So where are the
Christians — the evangelical, deeply conservative Christians, that
is, who so famously propelled George W. Bush into office? The
nation’s finally talking about Jesus, and they’re missing it? Not exactly. Some are still home sulking: They feel
betrayed, because the officials they elected to enact their agenda . . .
didn’t, and the contenders this time around clearly won’t. But
feistier Christian conservatives are using everything from blogs to pulpits
to influence the course of the presidential race. They may not have a
candidate they like, but they have one they can’t abide, and
that’s Barack Obama. A startling number of Christian conservatives have
decided that the junior senator from Illinois is a covert black
supremacist, a Marxist, and a baby killer. So instead of giving their
considerable energy to a Republican shoo-in who bores them, they’re
aiming it against Obama — with ammunition coming from conservative
activists in Illinois. They have watched him in action in the Illinois
General Assembly, met him, lobbied him, even tiptoed into his church
— and now they can tell the rest of the country why he’s the
worst possible choice for president. Some analysts say this is cool strategy: Christians on
the right would rather see Hillary Clinton win the Democratic nomination
because she has less chance of beating John McCain. But those analysts
haven’t spent much time talking to southern-Illinois pastors,
Concerned Women for America volunteers, and right-to-life activists. These
folks aren’t worried about cold logistics; they’re worried
about hellfire. They’re terrified that if Obama wins the presidency
they’ll find themselves living in a country that encourages abortion,
homosexuality, and obscenity; chops up embryos for their stem cells; mocks
traditional Christian family values; welcomes terrorists; and isn’t
fair to white people. Their old enemy Hillary Clinton, they say, is at least
a known quantity. Besides, says the Rev. Mark Roady, pastor of The Family,
an apostolic church in Waterloo, “I think Hillary Clinton would end
up with something of a stalemate, which may be the lesser of the two evils.
Obama could get some things accomplished — and that’s what
scares me.”

Anti-abortion marchers gathered to protest the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the United States.

PHOTO BY DEBBI MORELLO/MCT

Heart filled with joy, Fran Eaton walked out of
services at Parkview Christian, a huge evangelical church on the south side
of Chicago — then saw an Obama bumper sticker on a car in the church
parking lot and nearly threw up. “I wanted to say, ‘What are
you thinking? I
hope this is your first time here!’” she recalls, laughing
about how her husband steered her on, afraid that she’d give the
car’s owners a piece of her mind. She’s been fretting about
Obama since December 2006, when she went to his United Church of Christ
church with a friend to check it out. “We were the only white people
there,” she says. “Now, they were very kind — I love
going to black churches; I love the worship, the enthusiasm — but
when I started reading their Web site, I thought, ‘Whoa.’
It’s very, very angry against other races. There’s this
animosity and anger that has been welling up for years. I couldn’t
believe what [the Rev. Jeremiah Wright] was saying, like it was all our
fault. It scared me.”One of the first to raise the alarm, Eaton wrote about
her experiences at the church for “Always Right,” her column in
the Southtown Star,
a suburban paper in the Sun-Times chain. She hinted that Wright was a black
supremacist and wondered whether Obama, after years of membership in a
church that emphasized Afrocentrism, would push for racial quotas and
affirmative action. She then took her concerns to the Illinois Review, a
conservative blog she edits; and to the Illinois Family Institute, for
which she also writes a column; and to the Eagle Forum and Concerned Women
of America, for whom she lobbies; and to the homeschoolers for whom she
advocates, and soon she was being quoted in USA
Today (March 20, 2007). A year later,
Wright was being cited so frequently, Obama had to distance himself
publicly from his pastor’s rhetoric. “Oh, it was so scary to see Barack sailing
unchallenged, but he’s damaged now,” Eaton says with
satisfaction. Analysts say what the rest of Illinois is sick of
hearing: The only thing special about Illinois is Chicago and how big and
blue it is in relation to the other four-fifths of the state. Chicago, land
of Obama supporters, is what makes Illinois more religiously diverse than
other Midwestern states — and brings its racial and ethnic makeup
closer to that of the country as a whole. But the farther south you go,
past East St. Louis and Cahokia, your chances of even meeting someone
nonwhite drop sharply — and your chances of finding conservative
white evangelical Christians shoot high. Dave Smith, executive director of the conservative
Illinois Family Institute, has the geography down pat: “There’s
upstate Illinois, the Rockford area, pretty conservative; Chicago and the
suburbs through Aurora, mostly Democratic; central is kind of a mixture;
and downstate there’s actually a little Bible Belt there, metro East
St. Louis down through Marion. [Republican candidate Mike] Huckabee took
more than 30 percent of the vote.” Smith can recite those Huckabee
wins county by county, but he knows that they won’t make a difference:
“I don’t think conservative Christians are under any illusion
that they can win a blue state for McCain, especially if Obama is at the
top of the ticket.”According to Federal Election Commission stats
released March 3, individuals in Illinois have given more than $12 million
to Obama, compared with just over $1.3 million given to McCain. Illinois
ranked third in the nation in contributions to Democrats and 44th in
contributions to Republicans. Christian conservatives know they’ll never
change Illinois’ mind about Obama — so they’re trying to
change the nation’s. But why on earth would they prefer cool, restrained
Clinton to Obama, who speaks about his Christian faith with a fervor
similar to their own? That fervor has been his downfall, says John C. Green,
senior fellow of the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
“Hillary Clinton isn’t exactly conservative on social issues,
but they tend to give her a bit of a break because from their point of view
she’s not as deeply religious. Because he talks about his faith in
the way they do, they expect him to draw some of the same
conclusions.” When he doesn’t, they’re doubly irritated. “Hillary Clinton is an interesting figure
— from one perspective, evangelicals tend not to like her,”
Green adds. “They didn’t like Bill, and It Takes a Village [Hillary
Clinton’s primer on raising children, published in 1996] irritated
them, because they see it as collectivism — but they may very well
prefer her to Obama.” They certainly prefer her stand on Iraq and
terrorism to his. Also, “among many evangelicals there is a kind of
temperamental conservatism,” Green says. “They like things to
change slowly. Sen. Clinton has been around a long time, so she seems like
less of a risk, and — ” the carefully spoken academic
hesitates, then says in a rush: “frankly, there may be a bit of a
race issue. Maybe many can’t quite put it into words, but they just
feel more comfortable with a white woman than a black man.” Now add the exaggeration of his Muslim grade school
into a madrassa (with instant labels of “Barack Hussein Obama”
and “Manchurian Madrassa Candidate”) and the nervous-making
polemic of his pastor: “The dust-up over the rantings of
Jeremiah Wright exposes Barack Obama for what he really is — [an Al]
Sharpton (or worse) in sheep’s clothing,” writes Bruno Behrend
on the Illinois Review Web site, adding that by distancing himself from
Wright Obama is “akin to Peter denying Christ three times before the
rooster crows.” Behrend says Obama needs his rhetoric, “because
he knows that most of the nation will not elect an angry black candidate
running to ‘stick it to the man.’ If elected, sticking it to
the man is going to be the driving force of his entire
administration.”There’s more, of course. Obama’s UCC
denomination is, in many evangelicals’ eyes,
“unbiblical.” And they haven’t forgotten his talk at the
UCC convention last June, when he “slammed” (the verb chosen by
the Baptist press) evangelical Christian leaders for “hijacking
faith” and politicizing its tenets. “The so-called leaders of
the Christian Right are all too eager to exploit what divides us,” he
said. “At every opportunity they’ve told evangelical Christians
that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church while
suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only
about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer, and intelligent
design.”Those were brave words — especially when so many
evangelical Christians do give top priority to their fight against abortion
and same-sex marriage and Obama’s record on both issues is in their
minds the most damnable thing about him. One of Fran Eaton’s good friends is Jill Stanek
of Mokena, Ill., the nurse who, after holding a 21- to 22-week-old baby
with Down syndrome until he died, launched into pro-life activism. The
result: an investigation by the Illinois attorney general and the Born
Alive Infant Protection Act, defeated in Illinois — with Obama the
only opponent who spoke on the record but passed at the federal level.
“He alone stood on the floor and absolutely could not bring himself
to acknowledge that babies born alive when they were supposed to have been
aborted needed to be protected,” Eaton says. “Illinois is bought and paid for by very wealthy
pro-abortionists. They will dump $500,000 or $600,000 a year into
campaigns, and they have the money to do that,” Eaton says.
“One day at the Capitol he was walking by himself, didn’t have
an entourage. I said, ‘Senator, congratulations for the hard fight,
but I have to tell you something: We are going to pass the Born Alive
Infant Protection Act here in Illinois, and I want you to mark my words:
It’s going to happen.’ And he looked at me and said, ‘You
know what, Fran? I think you’re right, and as a matter of fact
I’ve been telling Democrats they need to rethink that.’ What? Here’s the man
who fought so hard against it! I don’t to this day understand what he
was saying.”Obama’s opposition to the act was, he’s
said, purely pragmatic: He didn’t believe it would stand a
constitutional test, because, as he read it, it would in essence render all
abortions illegal. When the same issue came before the U.S. Senate, a
clause was added to prevent such a reading — and Obama has said he
would have supported that version. But because he didn’t push that
version through in Illinois the pro-life community has never forgiven him.
“Living in this area, I am in tune with the
Barack Obama situation,” Eaton says. “I lobbied him in
Springfield. He — oh gosh. He thinks he is smarter than anybody. He
looks you right in the eye and tells you a lot of very good things you want
to hear, and then it’s really a different interpretation. He has
spread out the message of a social gospel, fighting poverty, and having
mercy on those who are ill, which of course I am for, helping people in
need — we are commanded to do that — but he is the most
pro-abortion senator I’ve ever dealt with.”That reputation makes him easy for evangelical
conservatives to demonize: “I don’t know much about him, but
I’m not crazy about him,” says Pastor Larry Croy of New
Testament Baptist Church in Waterloo. “He’s voted very
liberally and for abortion and all of that, so I will not be for
him.” Pastor Darrell Weber of Zion Evangelical Church in
Millstadt says he’s most deeply concerned about abortion, euthanasia,
“partial birth” abortion, the harvesting of stem cells, and
cloning: “We are all created in God’s image, and that is not
something to be toyed with.” Weber’s church used to be part of
the UCC, as Obama’s is, but withdrew in 2005: “Liberalism had
permeated that denomination,” he says. “Same-sex marriage,
abortion, and a number of other social issues were symptoms of a much
greater problem: a denial of the accuracy, the truth, and the inspiration
of the Bible.”Asked for a response to the evangelicals’
comments about Obama, his campaign has no comment.Christians on the right are far fewer than their
voices suggest. According to a new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion
& Public Life, the United States is about to become a
minority-Protestant country, with the overall total of Protestants barely
51 percent. Roughly half that number consider themselves evangelical, and
their politics vary, depending on how closely they feel law and public
policy must hew to the exact text of their Bible. In Illinois, roughly one-third of voters are
traditional white Protestants — mainline and evangelical combined
— and in recent years they’ve tended to vote Republican (in
2004, 63 percent backed Bush). But another third of Illinois voters are
Catholic — as are one-third of the state’s elected officials
— and their vote’s tougher to predict. Catholicism dips in and
out of liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican compartments
— emphasizing the “intrinsic evil” of abortion and
embryonic stem-cell research and the sanctity of traditional heterosexual
marriage but also extending its definition of “pro-life” to
include solidarity with the poor and concerns over immigrant rights, the
war in Iraq, and the death penalty. “That’s why Catholics get
frustrated when we go to vote,” says Robert Gilligan, executive
director of the Catholic Conference of Illinois. “We are politically
homeless.” How that will shake out in the presidential election
remains to be seen. In November the U.S. bishops released a document called
“Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” and although
they urge individual Catholics to make up their own minds they state,
“The direct and intentional destruction of innocent human life is
always wrong and is not just one issue among many.” In January 2007, the Rev. Michael Pfleger of the
Archdiocese of Chicago called Obama “the best thing to come across
the political scene since Bobby Kennedy.” Jean M. Heimann responded
on her Catholic Fire blog with a post titled “Barack Obama and the
Priest Who Sold His Soul to the Devil.” She described Obama as one of
“the slithering snakes of this world, who sneak up on you before they
suck the blood out of you, infecting you with their poisonous venom,”
and she urged readers to protest Pfleger’s statement to Cardinal
Francis George in Chicago. “[Obama] is the biggest hypocrite in
politics today,” she continued. “He has the audacity to call
himself Christian, yet strongly supports the slaughter of innocent babies
in his own back yard.” So the Catholic vote isn’t exactly predictable
— especially when you factor in the Iraq war, which evangelical
conservatives tend to support, to Catholics’ bemusement. Collen
Nolan, director of the Illinois chapter of Concerned Women for America,
says the organization doesn’t have a position on the war. “The
core issues are traditional family,” she explains. “If you can
protect the vulnerable and the weak of our society, other things fall into
place after that.”In Eaton’s mind, we’re fighting in Iraq to
preserve Western values — chief among them Christian feminism.
“Radical religious beliefs” — she means Islamic radical
religious beliefs — “have put us in a defensive position. We
can’t ignore those who would like to destroy our way of life. There
is a cultural war with people who would like the Western civilization to be
different. Jesus treated women with such respect, and they want to go back
into the teaching of Muhammad and those who would want us to be
squelched.”Move leftward from Eaton
to the middle of the continuum — or downward in time, to the next
generation of evangelicals — and the verdict changes. Younger and
less absolute evangelical Christians aren’t so sanguine about the war
in Iraq. They’re every bit as staunch as Eaton’s ilk in
opposing abortion, but they’re not nearly as het up about
homosexuality. It doesn’t resonate with them when Smith, at the
Illinois Family Institute, says the same-sex marriage issue is “front
and center in concern,” urges a full repeal of the state law that
added sexual orientation and gender identity to the Illinois Human Rights
Act, files obscenity complaints against radio shock jocks, writes about
“San Fransicko (liberal) values,” or calls homosexual marriage
“a fad that is quickly fading.” Centrist, moderate evangelicals’ concerns are
broadening quickly as the old evangelical leaders die or fade into the
sunset. The new breed of pastor is pulling back from the old political
skirmishes and preaching stewardship of the environment and a concern for
issues of poverty, personal debt, HIV/AIDS (about which the traditional
evangelicals are less worried than any other segment of the population,
according to Barna Institute surveys), immigration (some see their success
in evangelizing immigrants as outweighing the social chaos caused by their
presence), and global justice. They’re the unknown quantity in this election,
and some, like Dr. Dwight Stinnett, executive minister for the American
Baptist Churches of the Great Rivers Region, personally like the risks Obama has taken
in scolding all extremists — right-wing, radical black activist, or
fuzzy white liberal — by saying, essentially, “This isn’t
working.”Meanwhile, Eaton and her colleagues battle on, bracing
for disappointment. In November, Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly
promised members of the conservative organization, at a meeting in
Birmingham, Ala.: “We will come out of it; we have in the past and we
will again.” She’d already written a laundry listfor the next president: Among
other things, he or she must pledge the use of the nation’s highest
office to protect unborn life, traditional marriage, and American
sovereignty; screen out “activist” judges; reject the United
Nations Conventionon
the Rights of the Child and the United Nations Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; consider it a
presidential duty to prevent illegal entry into our country; and protect
parents’ rights to protect their children against such things as
mental-health screenings and nosy questionnaires about sex, drugs, and
suicide. Nobody was going to
fill that bill — certainly not Republican frontrunner John McCain,
who so famously condemned evangelists Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as
“agents of intolerance” eight years ago and is nibbling the
words today. Focus on the Family founder James Dobson has refused to vote
for him, saying he’s “convinced Sen. McCain is not a
conservative and in fact has gone out of his way to stick his thumb in the
eyes of those who are.”And now they’re rubbing their eyes and trying to
smile. “Look, McCain, we’re going to have to go with
him,” Eaton says. “He’s not going to be the best
we’ve ever had, but we’re only looking at one term.” She
brightens. “But I’m very pleased on the life issue, except for
stem-cell. I feel more secure with him choosing judges.”Smith, at the Illinois Family Institute, points to a
few more positives: Yes, McCain is a states’-rights guy when it comes
to sticky issues such as defining life or regulating marriage, but
“he’s a fiscal conservative, and he’s pretty good on the
life issue — NARAL ranks him as zero.”NARAL ranks Obama 100 percent. Some on the Christian right are now saying the
president they’d prefer is Alan Keyes, the conservative Republican
Obama trounced in the Illinois senatorial race in 2004. Keyes is black (so
there), and he’s the chairman of RenewAmerica, which he calls a
community of “Americans determined to make our nation worthy again of
the gifts we have received from Providence.” In a March 21 post on
RenewAmerica.us, Tom Hoefling — national political director of
America’s Revival: Alan Keyes for President — called Obama
“a counterfeit Alan Keyes plagiarizing the language of liberty and
equality for socialism.” Examples? “Barack Obama is cribbing
from the founding documents of this republic … He even borrows from
the Bible … He speaks of ‘we the people’ . . . ‘he
steals the constitutional theme of ‘a more perfect unity’ . . .
and, in between, he spouts classic Marxist class warfare rhetoric.”
On March 26, a post from Grant Swank on
RenewAmerica.us summarized the deepest fear of Christians on the right:
“The Bible prohibits killing womb babies and condoning homosexual
active lifestyles . . . Therefore, evangelicals had better get out and vote
for McCain whether they are magnetized to him or not, for if the Dems get
in America goes pagan.”Other posts rant against “cultural affirmative
action” and Obama’s “ties to racism and
anti-Americanism.” On March 24, Sher Zieve notes that “the
extremist hate group New Black Panther Party — led by Malik Zulu
Shabbazz — has endorsed Obama for president” and ends,
“Like it or not, we are judged by the company we keep and the
ideologies we support — either overtly or covertly. With that in
mind, presidential candidate Obama just gets scarier and scarier each and
every day.”Talk of race is a lot more strident online than it is
in real time, where the subject is addressed with exquisite delicacy. One
conservative Christian, for example — a lawyer who grew up southern
Illinois — insists that Obama’s race doesn’t bother him, but he’s afraid that
other world leaders will never negotiate with a black man. Still, the Rev. Donald Bailey, senior pastor of Shiloh
African Methodist Episcopal Church in East St. Louis, is taken aback by the
racial undercurrent to the attacks on Obama — and finds the
discussion of Wright especially mind-boggling: “He can’t
control what his pastor says! It has nothing to do with being president.
I’m praying for him. With this election, racism again has been
uncovered, and it’s alive and well. I thought we had made up some
ground, but it’s like we haven’t even begun. “You are looking at an African-American male who
is very intelligent and very capable,” Bailey says. “Compare
him to what we have in the White House right now, and it’s not even a
fair race — but they are deathly afraid of him. I don’t think
it’s about abortion. I don’t think it’s about the
health-care plan. It’s who he is and what he represents, and it
scares them to death: You can see it in their eyes.”He sighs heavily. “We have people who are voting
for the very first time, record turnout. That’s good news, but it’s being
tainted by all the pettiness and manipulation and negative talk. The
Republicans are on the sidelines continuing to bash Obama. They’ve got their candidate, but
they just continue to show their hatred toward this man, Obama Obama Obama,
every single day. Hillary Clinton lied to all of America, but it
doesn’t matter — Obama is still the devil.” A resident of Waterloo, Ill., Jeannette Cooperman is
a freelance writer with a Ph.D. in American studies. She writes about
religion and culture for the National Catholic
Reporter and other publications.